1. Field
The disclosure relates to a method, apparatus, system, and article of manufacture for generating a response in an offload adapter.
2. Background
A network adapter may be coupled to a host system to provide communications. Some network adapters may provide hardware support for the processing of data related to the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) or other protocols that may be used for communications. Such network adapters may be referred to as offload adapters, and if the provided hardware support is for the TCP/IP protocol then the offload adapter may be referred to as a TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) adapter. Further details of the TCP/IP protocol are described in the publication entitled “Transmission Control Protocol: DARPA Internet Program Protocol Specification,” prepared for the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (RFC 793, published September 1981). TOE adapters may perform all or major parts of the TCP/IP protocol processing, including processing send requests, i.e., requests to send packets from a host system to a computational device.
A protocol stack may be implemented in the TOE adapter, wherein some of the functions of protocol processing may be offloaded from a host system to the protocol stack, and wherein the TOE adapter is coupled to the host system and provides communications for the host system. The protocol stack for the TOE adapter may be implemented in hardware, software, firmware, microcode or any combination thereof.
Certain applications may be used for network exploration or security auditing. Such applications may transmit raw packets and attempt to determine what hosts are available in a network, what services the hosts provide, what versions of operating systems the hosts run, what type of packet filters or firewalls are in use in the hosts, and other characteristics associated with the hosts and the network. Certain applications perform such network exploration or security auditing for exploiting vulnerabilities in the hosts and the network.